Gan Gan Ganat Bote

What the Gan Gan Ganat Bote is

Gan Gan Ganat Bote is the Marathi chant of Shri Gajanan Maharaj, the saint who appeared at Shegaon in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra in 1878 and lived there until 1910. It is not a hymn composed by a poet but a single line of four words that he repeated constantly, and devotees took it up from him. Mantra 1 is the line as it is sung today, 'gan gan ganat bote'. Mantra 2 is the older written form, 'gani gan ganant bote', recorded in the ninth chapter of the Shri Gajanan Vijay, the verse life of the saint by Das Ganu. The words are cryptic and no reading is settled. Tradition takes 'gan' as the individual soul and 'ganant' as 'within the whole', so that the line says the soul dwells in the Supreme and is never apart from it. The last word, 'bote', is old and obscure. The sung form also opens the Gajanan Bawanni, a later devotional poem in praise of the saint.

The refrain heard beside a restless horse

According to the Shri Gajanan Vijay, Shegaon first saw the saint on 23 February 1878, Magh Vadya Saptami. Bankatlal Agarwal and Damodarpant Kulkarni noticed a young man, almost unclothed and with a glowing face, outside the house of Devidas Paturkar, picking grains of leftover food from discarded leaf plates and drinking from water kept for cattle. Bankatlal took him for a realised soul, and the town slowly came to agree. The chant enters the written record in the ninth chapter. A kirtan singer, Govindbuva Takalikar, had come to Shegaon with a horse so wild that no one could handle it, and it was tied at a Shiva temple for the night. In the dark, Gajanan Maharaj lay down among the animal's four legs and kept singing his refrain. Govindbuva rose again and again to check, and each time found the horse standing perfectly still. Das Ganu stops the story at this point to explain the words, reading 'gani' as counting or knowing the soul as one with Brahman and 'bote' as a worn-down word for the mind. He also notes that Shegaon sang the line in two ways. Devotional accounts say the refrain became so closely tied to him that the townspeople named him after it. He took samadhi at Shegaon on 8 September 1910, Rishi Panchami, after thirty-two years in the town.

The mantra, in six scripts

Gan Gan Ganat Bote lyrics in full

The chant as sung today, followed by the older form recorded in the saint's verse biography.

All 2 verses, in Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and English, each with its meaning. Choose a script:

The syllable people get wrong

In 'gaṇāta' (गणात) the final short a is silent in Marathi and the n is retroflex, so it is said 'guh-NAAT', with the tongue tip curled back for the ṇ, and not 'ga-NAA-ta' as a Sanskrit reading would give it.

When the Gan Gan Ganat Bote is chanted

Festival. Gajanan Maharaj Prakat Din, Magh Vadya Saptami

Questions